Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Former Member of Staff: Dr Howard Chiang

Academic Profile

  • 2012-2016: Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History, University of Warwick
  • 2012: PhD in History (History of Science), Princeton University
  • 2008: MA in History (History of Science), Princeton University
  • 2006: MA in Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences, Columbia University
  • 2005: BS magna cum laude in Biochemistry, University of Southern California
  • 2005: BA magna cum laude in Psychology, University of Southern California


Research Interests

My research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of twentieth-century China, with an emphasis on gender, sexuality, and the human sciences. A parallel strand of my research interest has been concerned with the mutual shaping of science studies and area studies. Broadly speaking, I work at the intersections of modern Chinese and East Asian history, the history of science and medicine, global queer studies, theories of empire, and Sinophone studies (esp. Taiwan and Hong Kong). In engaging with these fields, I am completing a manuscript titled "After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformations of Sex in Modern China." I have embarked on a new project tentatively called "China's Global Impulse: Medicine, Culture, and the Politics of Gender." With Hsiu-fen Chen, I co-directed an AHRC-funded research network on "China and the Human Sciences: 1600 to the Present" (2014-16). I am affiliated with the Global History and Culture Centre and the Centre for the History of Medicine and, from 2013 to 2016, served as the director of the MA Course in Global History.


Teaching

Main:
Other:


Selected Publications

Books:
Edited Special Issues of Journals:
  • "Rethinking Postcolonial Medicine in Taiwan and Korea," ed., special issue, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 11 (2017).
  • "Trans-in-Asia, Asia-in-Trans," ed. with Todd Henry and Helen Leung, special issue, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4, no. 3 (August 2017).
  • "Queer Asia as Critique," ed. with Alvin K. Wong, special issue, Culture, Theory and Critique 58, no. 2 (April 2017).
  • "Revisiting The History of Sexuality: Thinking with Foucault at Forty," ed., special issue, Cultural History 5, no. 2 (October 2016).
  • "Ordering the Social: History of the Human Sciences in Modern China," ed., special issue, History of Science 53, no. 1 (March 2015).
  • "Queer Transnationalism in China," ed., topical cluster, English Language Notes 49, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2011).
  • "Apparatus XY: Gender Praxes in the History of Chinese and Western Medicine," ed., special issue, gender forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies 24 (March 2009).
Journal Articles:
Book Chapters
  • "Changing Sex in the Urban Press: Scientific Modernity and the Shaping of Transsexual Subjects in Twentieth-Century China," in Power and Pleasure: Writing the History of Sexuality in China, ed. Howard Chiang (forthcoming).
  • "Transgender in China," in Handbook on the Family and Marriage in China, ed. Xiaowei Zang (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, forthcoming).
  • "In the Shadow of Empire: The Words and Worlds of Sexual Science," in Towards a Global History of Sexual Science: 1880-1960, ed. Douglas Haynes, Veronika Fuechtner, and Ryan Jones (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming).
  • "Christine Goes to China: Xie Jianshun and the Discourse of Sex Change in Cold War Taiwan," in Gender, Health and History in Modern East Asia, ed. Angela Ki Che Leung and Izumi Nakayama (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, forthcoming).
  • "Perverse Taiwan," with Yin Wang, in Perverse Taiwan, ed. Howard Chiang and Yin Wang (London: Routledge, forthcoming).
  • "Sinoglossia Incarnate: The Entanglements of Castration across the Pacific," in East Asian Men: Masculinity, Sexuality and Desire, ed. Xiaodong Lin, Chris Haywood, and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).
  • "Data of Desire: Translating (Homo)Sexology in Republican China," in Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters across the Modern World, 1880-1930, ed. Heike Bauer (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 72-90.
  • "Historical Epistemology and the Making of Modern Chinese Medicine," in Historical Epistemology and the Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, ed. Howard Chiang (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 3-38.
  • "Historicizing Chinese Psychiatry," in Psychiatry and Chinese History, ed. Howard Chiang (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014), 1-15.
  • "(De)Provincializing China: Queer Historicism and Sinophone Postcolonial Critique," in Queer Sinophone Cultures, ed. Howard Chiang and Ari Larissa Heinrich (London: Routledge, 2013), 19-51.
  • "How China Became a 'Castrated Civilization' and Eunuchs a 'Third Sex,'" in Transgender China, ed. Howard Chiang (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 23-66.
  • "Imagining Transgender China," in Transgender China, ed. Howard Chiang (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 3-19.
  • "Sexuality and Gender in Cold War America: Social Experiences, Cultural Authorities, and the Roots of Political Change," in Cold War and McCarthy Era: People and Perspectives, ed. Caroline S. Emmons (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 111-128.


Current Research

  • "China's Global Impulse: Medicine, Culture, and the Politics of Gender" explores the role of China in shifiting the global terms of social and cultural thought since the 1950s, focusing on examples in mental health, alternative medicine, social movement, and transgender cultures.
  • "Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History" is a 3-volume, 1 million-word encyclopedia commissioned by Charles Scribner's Sons that will be an up-to-date global companion to the Encyclopedia of LGBT History in America (2004) edited by Marc Stein.
  • "Sinoglossia" is a volume co-edited with Andrea Bachner (Cornell University) and Yu-lin Lee (National Chung Hsing University) that combines a heteroglossiac and heterotopian approach to the critical study of mediated discourses of China and Chineseness.


Conferences & Workshops Organized


Major Awards, Grants, and Fellowships


University Service

  • Equality and Diversity Working Group, Department of History, University of Warwick, 2016
  • Seminar Series Convenor, Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick, 2015-16
  • Course Director, MA in Global History, Department of History, University of Warwick, 2013-16
  • Postgraduate Committee, Department of History, University of Warwick, 2013-16
  • Asian Students Coordinator, Department of History, University of Warwick, 2012-13
  • Research Committee, Department of History, University of Warwick, 2012-13
  • Staff Fellow, Humanities Research Centre, Faculty of Arts, University of Warwick, 2012-13
  • Staff Search Committees, Department of History, University of Warwick, 2012-13 & 2014-15


Professional Affiliations

Howard Chiang mod

Historical Epistemology

Psychiatry and Chinese History

qsc_book_cover.jpg

book_cover.jpg